Twenty-One: Witness Interview (08-08-2022)
"We'd lived in the mountains my whole life. Back when I was a kid ever year you'd clear out some more trees and plant some things but by the time I was twenty or so not much would grow, and my parents were getting too old to plant anymore. By then the property, which was maybe fifteen acres or so, was still mostly wooded, but my father and his father had cleared a good two or three acres, which they left to be grass and various junk as well as our barn which had an old truck and mower in it and not much else. So we had a good view out a couple hundred feet each way and could see the clear sky without much trouble on a good night."
"I must've been twenty-five or twenty-six, it wasn't much longer after my father had passed, and my mother was getting so old she spent most of the day and every night sleeping. The house was pretty much mine, and I had to clean and maintain the whole property too. I wasn't too adventurous, so I never went out into the wooded acres, but I knew there were deer and a stream maybe three hundred yards from the house. Occasionally a bear would find its way to the edge of the woods, but they seemed pretty scared of people and all the noise and stink on us."
The road was pretty far from the house. The driveway was also, according to the county, a road, but since it only led to our house and our neighbors, who were a little ways down the road coming up to our house, it was no more than a driveway. The neighbors had even placed a private property sign at the foot of the hill the road was on, and the sign with the road's name had gone missing, though we all knew the neighbors had took it."
"Our land stretched out west mostly, on the east we shared a little access road with the neighbor. Older fella, lots of time on his hands, but we didn't know him too well. He'd been over for dinner once or twice, asked if he could park some trucks on our side of the road too when I was a kid. We didn't really bother each other, kept the yards out front clean. There's a row of trees between the houses, so we can't make his out except in the winter or at night sometimes."
"So yes it would be fair to say we were quite remote. We never had uninvited visitors, I doubt anyone really knew people lived up thataways. Most of the mountain was government owned, a few lots totaling maybe two hundred acres were private, they had talked about fracking on the mountain but they never did start. It was no point calling the police or fire department, by the time they would find us any fire would've eaten up the house or barn and any criminal would be long lost in the woods. That's why we would grow our food and had so many freezers for meat. We were lucky the county ran electric up that mountain too."
"It was probably about two or three in the morning, and since it was a Friday or a Saturday I was up late watching the television and making up for all the time spent at work or cooking or what have you for the week. I was pretty tired I will admit but I'm still sure of what I saw. In the summer it stayed pretty hot at night, and it was always humid, so it must've been about seventy-five or eighty degrees in the house, with the windows open since we didn't have much to pay for air conditioning all night. Maybe I hadn't noticed from being so tired, but when I got up to get another beer out the fridge I noticed it felt much hotter than usual, and I checked the thermostat which said it was ninety-five. I figured then it was just a real hot night and thought to close the windows and turn on the air conditioner, but my mother wasn't awake or complaining so I just got my beer and went back to the couch."
"So the show I was watching ended and I figured between the heat and the late hour I really ought to get some sleep. I turned off the television and went to the kitchen to throw out the bottle I had. I was standing at the sink, I don't really remember if I was washing my hands or just standing there but that's where I was. I don't remember how long I was standing there neither, but it couldn't have been long. I would say all of a sudden I saw it but it was more like it slowly started. Just this bright light, but not bright like blinding or a flood light but like a glow, kind of like a television screen but definitely bright. I thought for a second it was a fire in the bushes outside the kitchen, but it was so bright and a sort of natural yellow and it didn't flicker like fire or anything."
"It was so bright I feel like I have to make that clear, but the room wasn't lit up or anything like daytime or like someone was shining a flashlight it was just like a screen outside the window shining in. I went over to the kitchen door to go outside and try to see what was going on, like if a car was outside or something. I don't know why I didn't get my gun, something in me normally would've made me suspicious but I wasn't worried at all, it was like I was just curious. I wasn't even scared."
"Outside the glowing was all over, like it was up behind the trees and in the yard behind the house and overhead, but it wasn't one big shape. It wasn't shifting or anything, it wasn't like the Northern Lights or nothing like that. I'm sorry I can't really give you a description besides what it wasn't like, but I don't know what it was I saw. My neighbor was out there, he was right up maybe fifteen feet from my house, he had his shotgun and was all hunched over. He was yelling something at me, I could hear him yelling but I couldn't understand what he was saying. It was all quiet too, I couldn't tell why he was yelling or what he was saying. Him having his shotgun was strange too, its like that feeling of someone being all mad at nothing, I couldn't understand why he'd have his gun out. He also had sunglasses on, I do remember that."
"He cocked the shotgun and fired it a few times right at where the glowing was in the yard. The shells seemed to just float out of the gun, like they weren't being pulled down by gravity. I also remember I couldn't hear the gun go off even though he was right there. Then the glowing stuff kind of slid over, like it was a projector sheet being moved around, and moved between me and him, but I couldn't tell how close it was to me or him, like I didn't have any depth perception or anything. When it got past him he was gone, and the glowing kept moving until it was in the woods to the side of the house. All of it above and in the trees was gone, but I couldn't tell if it had faded or moved, it was just gone."
"I asked my mother about it in the morning, and she said she didn't hear a gun going off or any yelling, but she was a good sleeper so I'm not sure it would've woke her anyway. About a week later the police came by and asked about my neighbor, said he'd not been to work in a while and there was no sign of him. I told them about what had happened, and they didn't seem to believe me. Since there was nothing suspicious around my house or his I guess they assumed he got lost somewhere. I told the newspaper after the police came by and they said they didn't publish those kinds of stories. No one really seemed to care. Didn't help that me and my neighbor were both sort of shut-ins up on the mountain."